Heriot-Watt University’s MicroSNARE project has been awarded over £750,000 to develop less invasive cancer detection tests, preventing the need for painful biopsies and saving time and money in treating the disease.

The grant comes from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), a UK government agency working alongside UK Research and Innovation to fund research and training in engineering and the physical sciences.

The MicroSNARE project is led by Professor Nicholas Leslie of Heriot Watt University’s new Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies, and Professor Maïwenn Kersaudy-Kerhoas, the overall co-lead for the Institute.

Their work aims to develop robotic benchtop and microfluidic platforms, similar to the way some lateral flow tests work, in order to assess the most effective methods of using blood samples from breast cancer patients in identifying small amounts of cancerous DNA (ctDNA) circulating freely in their blood.

While methods to study ctDNA have been developed, the high presence of healthy DNA in patient’s blood and the scarcity of ctDNA present significant challenges for researchers in developing ways to identify these mutated cells.

Currently, in order to select their best treatment options, most cancer patients need to have an expensive biopsy operation to remove a sample of tissue from their tumour, however this new method could deliver more sensitive detection of cancerous cells, improved early identification rates, and require less expensive DNA sequencing. 

The hope is that this method can reveal more specific information about an individual’s cancer and provide guidance for health professionals about the treatments most likely to succeed.

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Professor Nicholas Leslie said: “In late-stage cancer patients, there’s quite a lot of DNA in the bloodstream that would be from a tumour, but often it’s too late to cure those patients.

“What we want to do is further develop a technique we’ve tested in the lab which we plan will allow us to diagnose, analyse and characterise tumours much earlier, as well as detecting the recurrence of cancer before it’s had a chance to develop and spread.”

The team is set to collaborate with Dr Olga Oikonomidou, a leading expert in breast cancer from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Genetics and Cancer, who will provide the relevant patient blood samples for analysis.

Remarking on the project, Dr Oikonomidou said: “Breast cancer survival is generally very good, particularly if patients are diagnosed early. The diagnosis is, however, still devastating for patients and families with patients living their lives with the constant fear of recurrence.

“We hope that with this new technique being developed by Professor Leslie and his team we will have the chance to overcome all the existing challenges and offer patients a successful and clinically meaningful follow up of their disease.”